The Jack-Knife Man

King Vidor, First National, 1920, from Williams's novel. F. A. Turner as Peter Lane, a whittling recluse on a houseboat who takes in a dying woman and her boy. Silent, about seventy-eight minutes. Vidor between The Turn in the Road and The Sky Pilot, shooting poverty without a sermon. The knife is a craft, not a weapon. A small-town plot about who is allowed to keep a child.